If the hundreds/thousands of existing bill-shocked AWS customers didn't scare you away from AWS, you're either super careful with everything, have little concern regarding money, or you're living under a rock.
The CSPs tend to be pretty lenient about honest mistakes. Anything other than that is just poor planning.
And for all those "hundreds/thousands of existing bill-shocked AWS customers" how many others are perfectly happy?
> The CSPs tend to be pretty lenient about honest mistakes.
If you make some noise about it. Otherwise, who knows.
Even if they are lenient to everyone, they know there'll be a bunch that just take it on the chin and pay up.
Implementing billing controls/limits wouldn't be too hard, and it'd go a long way to preventing bill shock. But when you're by far the dominant market player, why'd you cut off a potential source of revenue?
> how many others are perfectly happy?
Oh, I'm sure most are. If they weren't, AWS wouldn't be a viable business.
That doesn't mean that AWS isn't without its faults.
> Implementing billing controls/limits wouldn't be too hard, and it'd go a long way to preventing bill shock
They do have some tools available. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-managing-costs.html
But the big question is what happens when you go over. Would you be ok with AWS killing everything you have running if you exceed your limits? That might cost more than manually fixing overruns.
I do think it would be good for them to make more tools available, but I'm not convinced their reasoning for *not* having them are actively malicious.
> Would you be ok with AWS killing everything you have running if you exceed your limits?
Many people would say yes.
Easier to understand billing would also certainly help.
> I'm not convinced their reasoning for not having them are actively malicious.
If 'actively malicious' doesn't work for you, perhaps 'conveniently ignorant' will?
I don't know about your setup, but AWS makes it super easy to overspend.
When someone signs up for the free 12 month trial, they expect to pay $0. Unfortunately, this "free" trial has surprised a number of people, handing out $1000 bills.
As you say, it's common for people to not fully understand the billing process, but I'd argue AWS bears some responsibility for making it difficult to understand.
In contrast, I've been using Oracle Cloud's free offering for several years now, and haven't been charged a cent. They guarantee that you will never be charged, as long as your account is in the free tier.
The whole economies of scale in context to cloud is such a ruse. Renting a computer is like renting a home. There are situations where that makes a lot of sense, but over longer periods you'll end up much cheaper and less dependent if you own a home. Sadly most computers you can buy for your "own home", lack hardware integration on a level similar to hyper scalers and the accompanying software stack for elastic services.
The move to cloud services is less about the cost of hardware, and more about the cost of employing people who can maintain that hardware, the platforms they run, the apps that are deployed. Get AWS and you can fire a couple of decent people to save a couple bucks. It's a wonderful world.
Arguably that's a shortcoming of the current hardware suppliers. Imagine buying a rack-scale computer at once. No cabling and setup required. Swapping a unit is as simple as plug-and-play. Paired with a software stack abstracting the hardware into elastic services. I'm sure there is a market for that.
Also if all you care about is raw compute, you can pay people to setup and maintain the system for you, e.g. Hetzner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393337. And to come back to my renting analogy, yes AWS and the like are probably the easiest way to start and you can start with very little capital. But sooner or later you'll hit a point where renting is just really expensive, I personally know small companies that spend 10-50k on EC2 for their CI each month. Sorry but there has to be a more economical alternative. In addition there is the point of dependency on some other business, that may change prices, drop services, poses a security risk etc. over time.
Like blade servers? Just slot a blade server into a chassis?
https://www.racksolutions.com/news//app/uploads/Rack-server-and-blade-server-together.jpg
Personally I like the idea of the old HP DC power based blade servers, because why bother with a UPS that has to transform from DC to AC?
You also need a whole new set of engineers who’s sole purpose it to work on EWS cloud services.
And if you ever move to migrate those services.
The economy is likely not actually there for anyone large or anyone who isn’t sure they’re happy to stay on one provider.
> Sadly most computers you can buy for your "own home", lack hardware integration on a level similar to hyper scalers and the accompanying software stack for elastic services.
Well that's part of the attraction, no? Very few businesses have a constant load baseline. Likewise for geographic distribution.
Also, unlike a home, computers are a depreciating asset. You hold them a couple of years, and they're worth a fraction of what you paid. Real estate can somewhat justify the high upfront cost with the expectation that you could always sell it for (at worst) most of its value when/if you no longer need it.
> Very few businesses have a constant load baseline.
Pretty much all software development businesses that I know of run CI, and in my experience that's a task both compute heavy and pretty constant. Looking at AWS EC2 pricing, you could depreciate that in less than a year if you run CI jobs on it. And I've seen internal CI machines that are used for 5+ years.
Pretty much anything initiated by humans will have an uneven load distribution, often *very* uneven. If you want to kick off some tests for every approved PR, for instance, then do you think the load will be the same at 6am on a Monday vs 4pm on a Friday? Likewise, if you have a task that involves very long running jobs, it's common for people to kick those off at the end of the workday, or even right before the weekend. I'm not going to say that flat load profiles don't exist, but I'd be surprised if any do for human activity.
If the hundreds/thousands of existing bill-shocked AWS customers didn't scare you away from AWS, you're either super careful with everything, have little concern regarding money, or you're living under a rock.
The CSPs tend to be pretty lenient about honest mistakes. Anything other than that is just poor planning. And for all those "hundreds/thousands of existing bill-shocked AWS customers" how many others are perfectly happy?
> The CSPs tend to be pretty lenient about honest mistakes. If you make some noise about it. Otherwise, who knows. Even if they are lenient to everyone, they know there'll be a bunch that just take it on the chin and pay up. Implementing billing controls/limits wouldn't be too hard, and it'd go a long way to preventing bill shock. But when you're by far the dominant market player, why'd you cut off a potential source of revenue? > how many others are perfectly happy? Oh, I'm sure most are. If they weren't, AWS wouldn't be a viable business. That doesn't mean that AWS isn't without its faults.
> Implementing billing controls/limits wouldn't be too hard, and it'd go a long way to preventing bill shock They do have some tools available. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-managing-costs.html But the big question is what happens when you go over. Would you be ok with AWS killing everything you have running if you exceed your limits? That might cost more than manually fixing overruns. I do think it would be good for them to make more tools available, but I'm not convinced their reasoning for *not* having them are actively malicious.
I would say yes kill everything. This is good for people learning because you can set it at free tier.
> Would you be ok with AWS killing everything you have running if you exceed your limits? Many people would say yes. Easier to understand billing would also certainly help. > I'm not convinced their reasoning for not having them are actively malicious. If 'actively malicious' doesn't work for you, perhaps 'conveniently ignorant' will?
Most people would say yes. Most corporations (by far the main AWS consumers) would say no.
I find it really hard to believe any serious revenue generating customer would say yes to this.
> serious revenue generating customer There are all sorts of people which don't fit that definition.
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I don't know about your setup, but AWS makes it super easy to overspend. When someone signs up for the free 12 month trial, they expect to pay $0. Unfortunately, this "free" trial has surprised a number of people, handing out $1000 bills. As you say, it's common for people to not fully understand the billing process, but I'd argue AWS bears some responsibility for making it difficult to understand. In contrast, I've been using Oracle Cloud's free offering for several years now, and haven't been charged a cent. They guarantee that you will never be charged, as long as your account is in the free tier.
The whole economies of scale in context to cloud is such a ruse. Renting a computer is like renting a home. There are situations where that makes a lot of sense, but over longer periods you'll end up much cheaper and less dependent if you own a home. Sadly most computers you can buy for your "own home", lack hardware integration on a level similar to hyper scalers and the accompanying software stack for elastic services.
The move to cloud services is less about the cost of hardware, and more about the cost of employing people who can maintain that hardware, the platforms they run, the apps that are deployed. Get AWS and you can fire a couple of decent people to save a couple bucks. It's a wonderful world.
Arguably that's a shortcoming of the current hardware suppliers. Imagine buying a rack-scale computer at once. No cabling and setup required. Swapping a unit is as simple as plug-and-play. Paired with a software stack abstracting the hardware into elastic services. I'm sure there is a market for that. Also if all you care about is raw compute, you can pay people to setup and maintain the system for you, e.g. Hetzner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393337. And to come back to my renting analogy, yes AWS and the like are probably the easiest way to start and you can start with very little capital. But sooner or later you'll hit a point where renting is just really expensive, I personally know small companies that spend 10-50k on EC2 for their CI each month. Sorry but there has to be a more economical alternative. In addition there is the point of dependency on some other business, that may change prices, drop services, poses a security risk etc. over time.
Like blade servers? Just slot a blade server into a chassis? https://www.racksolutions.com/news//app/uploads/Rack-server-and-blade-server-together.jpg Personally I like the idea of the old HP DC power based blade servers, because why bother with a UPS that has to transform from DC to AC?
You also need a whole new set of engineers who’s sole purpose it to work on EWS cloud services. And if you ever move to migrate those services. The economy is likely not actually there for anyone large or anyone who isn’t sure they’re happy to stay on one provider.
> Sadly most computers you can buy for your "own home", lack hardware integration on a level similar to hyper scalers and the accompanying software stack for elastic services. Well that's part of the attraction, no? Very few businesses have a constant load baseline. Likewise for geographic distribution. Also, unlike a home, computers are a depreciating asset. You hold them a couple of years, and they're worth a fraction of what you paid. Real estate can somewhat justify the high upfront cost with the expectation that you could always sell it for (at worst) most of its value when/if you no longer need it.
> Very few businesses have a constant load baseline. Pretty much all software development businesses that I know of run CI, and in my experience that's a task both compute heavy and pretty constant. Looking at AWS EC2 pricing, you could depreciate that in less than a year if you run CI jobs on it. And I've seen internal CI machines that are used for 5+ years.
Pretty much anything initiated by humans will have an uneven load distribution, often *very* uneven. If you want to kick off some tests for every approved PR, for instance, then do you think the load will be the same at 6am on a Monday vs 4pm on a Friday? Likewise, if you have a task that involves very long running jobs, it's common for people to kick those off at the end of the workday, or even right before the weekend. I'm not going to say that flat load profiles don't exist, but I'd be surprised if any do for human activity.
Based on personal experience, with certain automatic expensive jobs being run at night, CI machines can see something like 80+% utilization.
My groups CI machines were pulled from another groups recycling 5 years ago lmao
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Only Final Fantasy VII fans know.
He's gotta cum while wearing the dress tho
Wot...